It seems unimaginable—a doctor electroshocking a patient into unconsciousness, hammering a modified ice pick through the patient’s eye socket, manipulating the instrument to destroy tracts of neurons in the brain cortex, then bandaging the eyes and sending the patient home to recover. The entire operation, a transorbital lobotomy, performed in 10 minutes or less. And this did happen—not once, but some 2,400 times between 1946 and 1967—each time at the hands of “the lobotomist,” American neurologist Walter Jackson Freeman II.

Today, the word lobotomy brings to mind images of patients whose expressions are blank, whose emotions have escaped them, whose personalities have been stripped away. It makes us think of radical operations, of holes being drilled into skulls, of “diseased” brain matter being extracted haphazardly. Perhaps, too, it makes us thankful for the remarkable advances of modern medicine and of antipsychotic drugs in particular.

In Freeman’s era, if a patient was one of the lucky few—perhaps one-third or so turned out be lucky, benefiting in some way—the individual may very well have been set free from the possibility of confinement in an insane asylum. Insane asylums, also known as psychiatric hospitals, were, for much of the first half of the 20th century, characterized by deplorable conditions. Admission was a one-way ticket, with recovery and return to society unlikely for most. So, while today we may tend to think of what Freeman did as ethically, morally, and medically unacceptable (not to mention legally questionable), in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, when no other options existed, many thought of him as a miracle worker. Arguably, Freeman, too, saw himself as such.

Indeed, Freeman was arrogant and his approach to medicine unscientific. He popularized lobotomy through mainstream media, something with which his partner, American neurosurgeon James W. Watts, was not wholly comfortable. The two performed the first prefrontal lobotomy on Sept. 14, 1936, and subsequently performed hundreds of operations. In 1945 Freeman developed transorbital lobotomy and the following year began using it on patients, without Watts’s knowledge, even though the two men shared a private practice in Washington, D.C. One day, Watts walked into Freeman’s office to find the latter forcing a pick-like instrument into a patient’s eye socket. He told Freeman that the procedure was inappropriate for a private office. So, Freeman took to the road, touring the country in what he described as his “lobotomobile” and stopping off at hospitals along the way to perform the transorbital operation on patients who lined up by the dozens. Not surprisingly, after the confrontation with Freeman, Watts ended their partnership.

Between 1936, when prefrontal lobotomy was introduced, and February 1967, when Freeman’s medical license was revoked, the lobotomist performed more than 3,500 lobotomies. Considering the precision with which brain surgery is performed today, that seems like an impossible number of brain surgeries for any one doctor to perform, much less perform to the best of his ability time and time again and without the aid of modern technology.

In fact, lobotomy, at best, was unpredictable, and for about 14 percent of patients, it was deadly. Worse, Freeman presumably operated on persons who clearly were afflicted by psychological disorders, but this was not always the case. Some patients underwent the procedure for reasons such as alcoholism or “bad” behavior or simply because they were perceived as “mentally disturbed” by relatives. He even operated on a 12-year-old boy, Howard Dully, whose stepmother wanted his personality changed.

One of Freeman’s most notable failures was the prefrontal lobotomy he performed in 1941 on Rosemary Kennedy, sister of John F. Kennedy. It is unclear to what degree Rosemary suffered from intellectual disability (mental retardation), though the condition seems to have produced only mild symptoms for much of her childhood. In her early 20s, mood swings and other changes in her demeanor led her doctors to suggest Freeman’s operation, which left the young woman in an infantile state and in need of institutional care for the remainder of her life.

Freeman’s interest in the ethics and science of medicine seems to have been lacking. Most doctors in the medical community opposed lobotomy, mainly because little to nothing was known about the organic nature of mental disorders. Furthermore, charging into brain matter with instruments designed to remove cores of tissue and destroy neuronal tracts only hypothesized to influence mental illness was not a scientifically sound idea. From Freeman’s perspective, however, there were no alternatives. And, judging from various accounts, he seems to have really cared for his patients.

But Freeman himself was not immune to the workings of the inner mind. He was a victim of insomnia and took barbituates to help him fall asleep. And to the casual observer, his obsession and fascination with probing into other peoples’ brains for answers to mental illness, and using an ice pick to do so, is in itself disturbing.

Still, when Freeman and Watts performed their first prefrontal lobotomy, they opened the door to the modern field of neurosurgery. And while the development of antipsychotic drugs drastically reduced the need for lobotomy, the development and improvement of surgical technologies and approaches that enable individual neurons to be turned on or off is needed. Such highly specific tools could prove vital to the treatment of severe neurobiological disorders such as schizophrenia.